At first, you probably won’t make any sense out what you are seeing. Once you get a hex editor, you can fire it up and load the savegame. Instead, you need a hex editor, which allows you to see and modify the binary file at byte level. This will make the contents look like gibberish, and altering any of the contents will probably result in crashing FTL once you try to load the modified savegame. In order to edit a binary file, you cannot use a regular text editor, as these programs parse the bytes in the binary file as ASCII. However, when you finally make it, it is usually worth the effort! While you’re working at it, it’s tedious and it can drive you crazy. Sort of like mentally climbing a mountain.
Reverse engineering can be quite rewarding. So, in order to understand which bytes to alter in order to make the game easier, I had to reverse engineer the file format.
The contents of this file is binary encoded in little-endian. I suspected that this had to be written to a file somewhere, and after doing some digging I found the savegame file called “continue.sav”. In-game screenshot of FTL showing the spaceship type “Kestrel”.įTL allows you to save your game using a single save-slot. Considering this game is quite difficult to finish in the first place (actually, I haven’t even finished it yet), I started looking for ways to tip the odds in my favor. There is no way to continue playing, so you have to start over. One of the most challenging aspects of this game is that when you’re dead, you’re *really* dead.
Lately, I’ve spent a few hours playing FTL: Faster than Light – the spaceship simulation, real-time, roguelike-like game.